TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A
challenges created by the pan-
demic, and 5 percent had put
reviews on hold or canceled
them, according to a survey of
317 employers by McKinsey & Co.
and LeanIn.org. Another survey
of 1,330 human resources offi-
cials, by Aon, a consulting and
insurance firm, found 47 percent
had made changes to their em-
ployees’ performance goals or
were considering them.
Several big tech companies did
make changes this year to their
performance evaluations.
For the first half of 2020,
Facebook did not give out indi-
vidual performance ratings and
used a formula to calculate bo-
nuses that were above the stan-
dard target — but is returning to
its typical process for the second
half of the year. Google combined
its usual two review periods into
one this fall and will rate employ-
ees against revised expectations.
Box, the file-sharing service, saysit is encouraging more regular
feedback between employees and
their managers and is having just
one formal review cycle this year,
rather than two.
Companies such as Goldman
Sachs, one of Wall Street’s oldest
and largest banks, say they are
trying to make the review process
more clear.
“The dynamics of today’s chal-
lenges underscore the need for
more transparency,” CEO David
Solomon wrote in a memo.
Managers will meet with em-
ployees three times a year, for-
malizing a process that was only
encouraged before. The bank is
also disclosing for the first time
more about how performance
ratings — from “exceeds expecta-
tions” to “partially meets expec-
tations” — are distributed among
employees.
In a year of Zoom meetings
and work-from-home life adjust-
ments, companies’ traditionalmethods of observing employees’
performance have been upended,
and their evaluation process is
laden with pandemic-era chal-
lenges.
But human resources experts
also say there’s a potential up-
side: Remote work naturally forc-
es more scheduled check-ins be-
tween bosses and workers, which
could have a lasting impact.
“If more people are working
remotely, they will be checking in
weekly with their managers, and
I think it could diminish the need
for the annual performance re-
view,” said Brooke Green, who
leads the employee rewards prac-
tice at Aon.
Some companies are focused
on simplifying time-consuming
evaluations, said Josh Bersin, a
longtime human resources ana-
lyst. “The continuous refrain is,
the process we were doing before
the pandemic was very bureau-
cratic. All those hours spent talk-ing in conference rooms — we
don’t have time for any of that,”
he said.
“For all the years I’ve been
studying this, everyone has been
trying to simplify performance
management,” Bersin said. “Now
they’re doing it because they have
to.”
After the novel coronavirus
struck, human resources leaders
at Anheuser-Busch InBev knew
they wanted to streamline their
individual reviews, a career de-
velopment process that tradition-
ally lasted six months and in-
volved many time-consuming
“calibration” meetings.
“Why are we spending so much
time on a process where there’s a
lot of bureaucracy behind it?”
said Marianela Comino, global
director of talent management at
AB InBev.
The company briefly consid-
ered postponing the reviews this
year, Comino said, but decidedBY JENA MCGREGORAs the pandemic wore on this
spring, Christine Carrillo, the
chief executive of Butlr Health, a
small online start-up that match-
es people with therapists, decid-
ed to postpone the remaining
performance reviews scheduled
for her employees this year — and
probably next year, too.
“The added pressure and un-
necessary stress given to reviews
right now with everything else —
it just feels like a waste of time,”
she said. Instead, she meets with
each of her seven employees bi-
weekly for informal check-ins,
Carrillo said.
The pandemic has forced more
companies to reevaluate their
performance reviews, long the
bane of employees and their
managers. The shift has acceler-
ated a trend toward more fre-
quent feedback and greater focus
on career development.
Some are postponing — at
least for now — the time-consum-
ing and cumbersome ritual of
corporate America. Others are
attempting to simplify the proc-
ess as they weigh how to evaluate
employees facing unprecedented
upheaval and working from
home until next summer — or
longer.
Carrillo says she’s not sure she
will ever bring back the formal
review process. “I’m always an
advocate for removing things if
they don’t work,” she said. “If we
don’t have one next year and that
goes well, we might not add it
back.”
But some experts worry em-
ployers aren’t doing enough to
change the way they evaluate
employees at a time when many,
particularly working parents —
and disproportionately mothers
— are facing mounting burdens.
“The pandemic has unleashed
an enormous shock, but that’s not
getting reflected in the way so
many companies are thinking
about performance reviews,”
Marianne Cooper, a senior re-
search scholar at the Stanford
VMware Women’s Leadership In-
novation Lab, said in an email.
Two recent surveys, while not
comprehensive, provide a small
snapshot into how some compa-
nies have reacted to the crisis.
About 30 percent of companies
said they adjusted their perform-
ance evaluations to account for
not to after receiving a high
response rate for its “360-degree”
reviews — in which workers are
evaluated not only by their man-
agers but peers and direct re-
ports. It showed how much em-
ployees still wanted feedback,
Comino said.
Anheuser-Busch InBev decid-
ed to focus on simplifying the
process instead, which included
shortening it to 2^1 / 2 months.
The changes, Comino said, will
be permanent. “Everything we
change will be for good,” she said.
With many employees expect-
ed to continue working from
home well after the pandemic
ends, corporations may be left
with a split workforce that will
pose many unique challenges,
human resource experts say.
Managers are more likely to
positively acknowledge people
who are in the office, while re-
mote workers are more likely to
get corrective feedback, said Bri-
an Kropp, vice president of re-
search at Gartner.
Companies must prevent this,
he said, or “people that decide to
come back and work from the
office are going to be career
advantaged compared to people
who continue to work remote.”
Twitter says it’s already trying
to guard against any unfair bias.
When it sent its 5,200 workers
home in May, the tech giant
suspended all reviews for the
duration of 2020. The decision,
according to human resources
chief Jennifer Christie, was made
after she heard from struggling
parents who felt they could not
keep up. Christie realized the
pandemic created such divergent
circumstances among employees
that it would not be fair to
compare their performance in a
formal evaluation.
Since the company has an-
nounced a permanent work-
from-home policy, Christie said,
Twitter is rethinking its entire
performance review system so it
will not be biased against people
who spend more time outside the
office.
“We want to create that parity
with people who work from
home, so that if you work from
home, you’re not a second-class
citizen,” Christie said.
[email protected]Elizabeth Dwoskin contributed to this
report.One potential pandemic upside: Performance reviews are getting simpler
STEFAN WERMUTH/BLOOMBERG NEWS
A woman works i n a home office in Bern, Switzerland, on A ug. 22. Work-from-home adjustments a nd other pandemic-related challenges
have led companies to look at how they evaluate their e mployees, with many firms deciding to postpone or redesign the process.Tuesday, Oct. 20 at 9:30 a.m. ET
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